I have been using IRCTC website for booking train tickets from last 3-4 years now. I am a regular traveller and need to use this website almost 3-4 times a month. I am really impressed with the service of internet ticket booking provided for train travel which saves my hours, efforts and money to book tickets frequently from ease of my home or office.
It is a boon due to which train travel has picked up and is a real help for people who are a bit internet savvy and want to save their time by paying just a little more as service charge for ticket booking.
Pros:
Fast booking
E-ticket as added advantage
WL booking for e-tickets (started about an year back)
Many payment options
Reprint of tickets possible for e-tickets
Cons:
Pathetic and worst customer service
WL e-tickets gets automatically cancelled if not confirmed
Crappy seat/berth allotment logic
Leave apart everything, they have got one of the most pathetic customer support a person cannot even think of.
If there is an issue and you mail the customer support, auto response with case number is the only prompt thing that happens. You never get any response back. Even after sending reminders you at the most might get one reply after 4-5 reminders which will not even answer your query or explain why its happening like that way. The only thing one can do it keep following up in hope that someday they will resolve your issue. Added to this most of their staff is actually not aware of all rules and regulations of railway, so they provide you all stupid reasons.
They don’t even have a toll free number to cal, so one has to waste money by calling STD. When you call up, don’t even think of being catered to immediately. Instead you will be on hold for long time and will just end up wasting your precious hard earned money in STD calls. Maybe BSNL/MTNL pays IRCTC for making their earnings higher.
2nd issue is their logic to allot seat/berth. I have not been able to understand this in last 3-4 years. They just don’t seem to give adjacent seats to one ticket booked. If you book a ticket for 3 members, you will end up having seats all across a compartment.
Overall, a good facility with pathetic customer service.